Fifty years ago today Beatle George Harrison along with his wife Pattie, Patti’s sister Jennie, Beatles right hand man Neil Aspinall, Derek Taylor and Alex The Magician- visited the hippies in Haight- Ashbury, San Francisco. The so called Summer of Love was centered in Haight-Ashbury but by the time George arrived the scene was not to his liking. The following is what George had to say about his impressions of Haught-Ashbury.

“I thought it was gonna be all these groovy kinds of gypsy people with cool shops making works of art and paintings and carvings, but instead it turned out to be just a lot of bums, many of them who were just very young kids who came from all over America and dropped acid and gone to this mecca of LSD. ….It certainly showed me what was really happening in the drug cult. It wasn’t what I thought with all these groovy people having spiritual awakenings and being artistic. It was like any addiction. So at that point, I stopped taking it actually.. the dreadful lysergic. That’s where I really went for the meditation.”

George’s visit was a short one. From what I have read over the years- by the time the media had gotten a hold of the hippy scene in Haught-Ashbury- the good trip had already turned into a bad one and the publicity is was getting was attracting too many people from around the country and too many tourists.